


We all define ourselves

by orphan_account



Category: Dragon Age II, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: F/F, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-03-21
Updated: 2013-04-08
Packaged: 2017-12-05 23:44:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 9,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/729245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of drabbles originally posted on my tumblr, mostly inspired by artwork or prompts. Every chapter, for the most part, is a stand-alone work, grouped together for ease of reading.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Everyone always compared fighting, dueling, to dancing, and there was truth enough in that for taste.

That arching flex from heel to toe would have been at home a pair of fine lady’s shoes or the leather casing of her favorite boots or nothing at all. Barefoot on a moonlit dock, dancing for no one, for the wind and rain and the echoing strains of her own laughter, bowing to the waves’ lacy petticoat trails, the swirl of cotton her skirts, catching and filling with the hush of breath, held, before the next step (before the fall)

the song’s end.

There was truth in that.

In moments shared, twisting, twisted. In broken shards of sunlight and moonlight and the lights of their eyes. In breaths. In laughs and cries. In moments won and moments lost, steps remembered and forgotten. The dance broken and gaping, to be fixed or left behind in the mad swirling rush. In metal snapping like serpents, like the pass of a gilded fan, every fluttering, solitary motion meaning so much more and so much less than they were.

Everyone always compared fighting, dueling, to dancing, and there was truth to that. But not enough.

More accurate would be to compare dancing to fighting. Or fucking. Or cussing, just for lovely, rich taste of it on her tongue and lips, feeling them purse up, widening to answer and echo and mirror Aveline’s fr(own). Because it was none of those things, and all of them.

Fighting, dueling, was truth. The truth of nothing but itself, of meaning, of looking to an outflung foot catching on Darktown grit and seeing nothing but a foot. Seeing a lifetime’s worth of blood and sweat and tears boiled and melted and shaped into a muscle that bent without a moment’s thought to bear her into a crouch. Seeing a person glorying in life, in every indrawn breath that tasted like rain and triumph and a swift, fierce joy in the doing. Seeing a pirate. A woman. A fighter. A crook. A slattern, because truth was ever changing. Was fluid as a dance, as a duel, taking on new permutations of meaning with every glancing blow, words and connections and lives missed and lives found and lives lived to be lived.


	2. Chapter 2

Bethany was so annoying. She hogged the bed. Stole all the covers in the night and kicked and talked in her sleep, giggling and holding conversations with people he’d never heard or or were pretty sure didn’t exist, and when he told her about it, she’d just get that look on her face and nibble on the ends of her braid and say that she hadn’t been dreaming at all. Smile at him when he didn’t want to smile and hold his hand. She’d cheer him up when he didn’t want to be cheered up, when he’d wanted to be mad at her and father and Marian, because he’d been left alone again, because father had started taking Bethany away in the mornings, too. She was so happy. She’d talked about it for weeks beforehand. For hours and hours. Lacing her fingers into a crown behind Carver’s head and smiling that crinkly-eyed smile she hadn’t had when he told her he wanted to get her a dagger for their nameday, just the one he’d got, and

he wanted to go, too.

She talked about it in her sleep that night, too. Loud enough she didn’t wake up when he drove the first nail through her hair, or the fourth.

She’d had to have her hair cut to get it out. She’d cried when the first curl fell to the bed (he didn’t tell anybody how his stomach flip-flopped when she turned away from him to hide her face in mother’s skirts) and said she didn’t even want to go, but she was smiling when she said it.

Bethany was always smiling. Even when she didn’t want to, when they cut her open and bared her wide. Even when nobody else did.

It pissed him off.

She was still smiling. A tendril of damp hair lay plastered against the bow of her mouth, hidden, like a secret, and he stared at it. At her. At the funny little upturn of her nose that Marian and father shared with her, but he didn’t. At the scar on her chin from the time he’d fallen against her (been pushed, more like) during a pillow fight and his front teeth had gone right through. At the scarf he’d made for Peaches but that Bethany had found, thrown away, because he’d been too embarrassed to give to her.

Her stupid chainmail.

Her chipped tooth.

Her pouches. Her boots. Her cracked palms, still caked with soot and flour and blood. Her freckles. His freckles.

His softly indrawn breath, held, wanting her breathe, willing her to breathe. His hands shaking as mother bent over her. Tucking back dampened curls the exact shade of his own and asking her to wake up.

To stay.

Bethany stared up at him from the ground and smiled as his voice started to crack and break apart upon hitting the air.


	3. Chapter 3

A portrait still lies, forgotten, in the Amell family mansion. There is no one to notice its absence. No sweet young women on the cusp of womanhood there to touch it with wondering hands and eyes, mouth curving into a slow, growing smile to see the same high cheekbones that looked at her every day from across the breakfast table. No mages grown confident enough in her abilities and in herself enough to touch a finger to Marian’s stray lock of hair and remark that this is what mother’s must have felt like, like silk and the underside of elfroot leaves, soft as a dream and slippery, slick and sliding and impossible to hold as the woman herself, as the cheeky grin sighted just before being pushed into Varric’s arms or a seamstress’s tape. No sunshine there to light up Leandra’s face as she kissed each shadowed line and arch, there to press warm lips to that aristocratically upturned nose and tease that this was how she’d always known they would end up here, because the two of them would have drowned in Feraldan’s heavy rains if they’d been there much longer, with their noses so high up in the air. No sister to wrap her arms around a silhouetted shoulder familiar to anyone who’d opened a Kirkwall geneology, to pull Carver closer and whisper that this was his chance for a new beginning, his chance to use his name to carve himself out a place just his size.

The painting crumbled quietly away in that basement. Every day it would flake and crack a little more, the smiling face slipping away to join the gathering dust.


	4. Chapter 4

“Three years.” Marian’s voice was approaching a whine, sulky and frustrating and muffled into his shoulder, cheeks pressed up into her mouth until it was bent out of shape. Lips twisted into an expression that, from this angle, looked less like the proud and storied tilted smirk she’d bestowed on any and all comers than, to put it bluntly, a pout. Or a duck. His fingers drummed idly on his knee, already thinking about where this would best fit into his narrative. “Maybe I’m losing my touch. My womanly wiles. Say, Varric,” she said, peering up at him from beneath her lashes, “maybe I’m being too subtle. Do you think he’d take it badly if I lifted his skirts and ravished him here and now? I mean to say,” she said, eying the way Anders’ throat bobbed as he laughed, “is there room for misinterpretation there?”

“You don’t want me to answer that, Hawke.” But he already was, and he suspected Isabela was, too. Judging by the delighted gasping grin, she already halfway through penning the latest of her friendfictions in her head, including the bits where Anders took her and she took him and they gave of each other, prayers whispered against sweat-soaked skin and in the spaces between breaths, between heartbeats. In those moments where the world narrowed down to the person in their arms and nothing mattered but that burning ache that roared in their chests, their ears, their hands that grasped and mouths that bit and parted and pressed kisses to heated skin, pushing them apart and pulling them together all at once, until they lost all sense where one ended and the other began.

“But if you did?”

“If I did?” He drawled, tilting his head to follow her line of sight to a twist of gold, pale skin winking in the lantern light, and he saw what Marian did not, that no matter where Anders was in the room, he always managed to be turned to face the woman currently wearing a hole in his coat pocket. Varric slapped her hand away, and the one sneaking towards his ale. “I’d probably take it upon myself to ask you your intentions.” Liar. He already knew them, better than self. Her intentions had been clear from the moment she’d set foot in Anders’s clinic. From the moment she’d looked at him she’d been lost. As lost in him as Varric in her, in her every unnoticed gesture and word, because the woman he saw, the woman he invented, needed no one so much as they needed her.

There was no wrong way to take it, he could have said, because Anders had already taken it every possible way. Because he was as lost as she was, and there was no saving them now. But he couldn’t say that, so instead he smiled and patted Hawke’s shoulder and spouted off a line that made her laugh and turn to look up at him and call him a liar.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This one takes some explanation. My Grey Warden, Tsurin Tabris, began life as a Dragon Age 2 RP made purely for shits ‘n giggles with my lovely girlfriend here, and I ended up loving her so much she ruined my life. So, canonically, this would fall into that AU. 
> 
> Based upon the prompt: Tsurin/Varric/Secret feels for Fenris!

Tsurin worried at her bottom lip, nibbling it between her teeth with every card shuffled into her hand. Every painted face that stared up at her, helpful as any real shem noble and just as likely to cost her hard earned money. Or her clothes.

Varric wasn’t making it any easier, either. His arm pressed against the bare skin of her stomach, sending little electric thrill racing through her wheresoever his fingers brushed against her, warming her from the inside out and playing merry hell with her concentration. That had to be deliberate. She glared at him out of the corner of her eye and pinched him, hard, on the inside of his thigh, and he just smiled and asked her if she intended on taking her turn at all tonight, or he’d be forced to assume that this was her resignation? “Rivaini must be rubbing off on you,” that smiling mouth said in answer to her scowl. “You being so willing to walk back to the Alienage without your pants.”

“I quite like them where they are,” Isabela purred, elbows braced to lean closer to Fenris with a widening grin. He’d quite literally beaten the pants off Tsurin in the previous round. They hung low on his hips, baring a smooth expanse of muscled thigh that rolled and shifted as she watched. “But I’m afraid the rest has to go, sweet thing. Don’t think I’ve forgotten in all this fuss. Pay up.”

“No, I expect you didn’t,” was all Fenris said. It looked like there would be more, but he just quirked his mouth in the way that he had and rose to his feet, stripping out the last of his underarmor.

It was a long moment before Tsurin realized that she was staring, mouth parted around the shape of a question, or a sigh. That she was staring not at the shadowed curve at Fenris’s belly that had so captured Isabela’s attention but at his mouth, his eyes, looking for that slow, sweet curve at the corners that meant that he was laughing. He wasn’t, not out loud. But she could see it in his eyes as he turned, in the press of his thumbs over his glass. Her breath caught, and she released a choked, shaky laugh on the exhale, rising, embarrassed and-

Oh.

“Oh, no,” Tsurin moaned. Her hands came up to hide the reddened tips of her ears.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> How about Izzy saving Hawke from a bunch of snotty nobles?

The party would later be regarded by most as a great success.The food would looked back on with that peculiarly envious sadness all good meals are remembered by,the wine plentiful, and no one declared war over the cheese course. Anyone who was anyone was there, they’d continue, voices dropping to hushed whispers as the teller began to recount a long line that began and ended with the city’s Champion, Marian Hawke. It had been the talk of the banquet table. How it happened that she was there at all. The Champion’s disdain for high society was infamous, as was her legendary stubbornness on certain issues.

Some were of the opinion that she’d been blackmailed. That her mother had been involved, or that the party had actually been a cover for one of her rumored liaisons with apostate mages. However it happened, it was sure, there was a story behind it. It was written in the stiff set of her shoulders, the fists she kept clamped tight to her side as she wound her way through the keep’s crowded ballroom. Anger, everyone agreed, nodding their heads both at whoever had had the skill to pull off such a thing and at the idea of that same person’s inevitable fate.

What was not discussed was how the mighty and storied champion couldn’t dance to save her life —not dances fit for these halls, anyway— and so was forced to make awkward conversation with people she didn’t particularly like, who didn’t particularly like her either, but loved the idea of having a Champion in their corner. How she hated the smell of all that rich food, but she ate it anyway. Had to, to give herself an excuse not to talk to anyone. She’d managed to successfully evade a certain trio of Orlesian nobles for hours this way, but she was starting to feel sick. And anyway, mother was making eyes at her over the dates again.

She managed to put off the inevitable by almost another half an hour by pleading a sick stomach, but the Orlesians finally managed to corner her by the Avvar statue. They started right in on the cries of surprised delight, as if they hadn’t been stalking her all evening like a mabari stalked a rabbit, with much doffing of hats and twirling of hands. She couldn’t help staring at the enormous feather on the one fellow’s hat, fixated with a sort of horrified fascination as it dipped and swayed lower and lower every time he bowed. She kept expecting it to fall off but it never did, more’s the pity. It was probably very rude, but it was much more interesting than their conversational topics. Trade routes this, Val Royeaux that, Divine this, such an incredible honor to meet the savior of out southern cousins, we had hoped to speak to you about another way you can do honor and respect to your mother country, perhaps you’d care to take a look at these forms I brought with me, that-

Caught, Marian had no choice but to lean over the offending document. It was a terror worse than any remnants of the Deep Roads expedition, all numbers and percentages and excitedly phrased questions on her opinion of the taxation of the roads, meserre, why, the income from the newest pilgrimages to the site of Andraste’s Ashes alone-

So it was with no small amount of relief that Marian looked up just in time to see the gloved hand fall on her waist, pulling her stumbling back against Isabela’s side. “I do apologize,” the pirate queen purred, false sincerity dripping from her tongue, sweet as sugar, “but it’s getting late, and I do believe my name was on your dance card, Hawke.” Isabela didn’t wait for the protests she knew were coming, just tugged on a belt loop, pulling Marian out after her onto the dance floor.

“Oh, Maker, Isabela,” Marian laughed as soon as they were safely out of earshot, pinching the bridge of her nose where she could feel a tension headache coming on. “I was promised no assassination attempts this time.” She looked up with a grin, expecting an answering one, or a pinch, a ribald joke, not outstretched arms, uplifted in the air to hold an invisible person and-

Oh.

Oh.

“There’s. I mean, there’s usually a reward for rescuing imperiled nobles, isn’t there?” Marian laughed into the silence, her laugh sounding strange and high to her own ears. “They’ll probably carve statues in your honor, pen an ode to your-“

“I could think of a few ways,” Isabela interrupted, stepping close, too close. Her hands came up and repositioned Marian’s, settling them on shoulder and hip and oh, she sighed as Isabela stepped into the circle of her arms. “Don’t worry,” she smiled into the crook of Marian’s neck, “I think your body remembers how to move, eh?” Her hand slipped down the curve of Marian’s backside, a movement Marian shouldn’t have been able to feel through the thick leather encasing it but she did anyway, as a jolt, as a ticklishly light press against her chest, straight through to her heart. “This time, I’ll even let you lead.”


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anders trying to drink Oghren under the table on a bet at Vigil’s Keep.

Later, he wouldn’t really be able to piece together the story behind the whole thing. He remembered how it began, with the(slightly exaggerated) recounting of that time he’d managed to escape his cell in the tower, evading templar patrols as he made his way down, only to end up having to hide in the side pantry, the one they kept all the liquor in. And of course how he’d accidentally locked himself in, and since there’d been nothing better to do…

Oghren had immediately shot back with a boasting account, which Anders had then felt honor-bound to top with a story of his own, and so on and so forth until finally one of the other of them challenged the other to prove it.

He’d considered backing out, he was man enough to admit that. At least, he had until the Warden Commander had turned to look at him, and in that moment Anders had felt that same old spike of panic, the one that compelled him to crack jokes and pull faces and to laugh, because laughing with someone was better than their laughing at you, or laughing alone. And so he’d found himself opening his mouth and calling Oghren a milk swilling nug-jumper, or whatever it was the dwarf said all the time, and the bet was on.

He’d started off well, he remembered that. Had a somewhat shaky start, but by then word had spread to the other wardens and a small crowd had started to gather, with people shouting encouragement. Money changed hands, he recalled, and he thought he remembered someone fetching whiskey from the Commander’s room. It might have been the Commander, but by then Oghren had started crooning to his drink, long, low sounds that trailed together in his head in a slippery mess that had no beginning and no end and he might have been singing along by then, or maybe it was Oghren’s twin, who’d shown up unannounced but seemed to have every intention of helping him cheat his way to victory.

He didn’t recall protesting the injustice of it all, but Sigrun told him later that he had, and that he’d been quite shrill about it. Anders didn’t think the shrill part had been necessary, but he did remember Oghren’s laugh. “Givin up already, eh?” He’d said, whispers dripping with golden foam. “Shoulda known you hadn’t got the stones for it. Need your stick to hold em on,” he’d laughed, burbling bass giggles.

The rest of the evening was something of a haze after that.

The room was quiet, now. He must have passed out, and stayed out for a good long while. Some kind soul had pillowed his robes under his head. That was nice of them, he thought muzzily, only gradually piecing together the problem there. His brow knit. After a long moment passed, filled with small groans and bigger cusses, Anders dropped a hand to confirm that, yes, he was in his smallclothes. He was lying on the floor in the middle of the Grand Hall, using his robes as a pillow and a dwarf as a mattress. Wait.

“You lost.”

Anders jerked his head up at the words and immediately regretted it, clutching at his head with a moan. Nathaniel looked somewhat less than sympathetic. He crossed and recrossed his legs, prompting the second realization that Nathaniel’s booted feet were propped up on on his back. That would explain the pain there.

“You slept through your rotation,” Nathaniel went on. “I’d have woken you up, but the commander felt that waking up the two of you on your wedding night was less than-“

“What?!” Anders jerked off the still-snoring Oghren and fell flat on his ass, sputtering and scrabbling at his clothes, that wasn’t- that was taking advantage of the inebriated, didn’t any of them have morals, he never-

He stopped, stared at the ghost of a smile tucked into the corners of Nathaniel’s mouth. “If you’re going to try that again, may I suggest eating something first.”

He heard Oghren laughing to himself on the floor behind him and started protesting all over again, struggling with the sudden tight feeling constricting his throat, until a thick, square-fingered hand clapped him on the back, nearly knocking the slim mage over. “Held yer own pretty good fer a walkin stick,” he grinned, and Anders almost didn’t mind the smell when Oghren leaned over and kissed him on the cheek with a laugh, called him sweetie, because the tightness had moved down to his chest. And there was really nothing to do for it then but to grab those braids and haul him down for another one, full on the lips, and demand a rematch.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I woke up with a lot of Morrigan feels today. A F!Warden & Morrigan friendship story would be grand. Or even just some Morrigan headcanon drabble.

Literally laughing out loud at the idea of a drabble so I don’t cry. Started out writing a bit of fluff and somehow I ended up writing this multi-paged monstrosity. Hope you like it, cap’n! And thank you for keeping me and bouncie company in googledocs, always a pleasure! (The warden contained within this story is my own canon Grey Warden, by the way, of whom I’ve written about a few times before.)

The first arrow took them by surprise, zipping past Morrigan’s nose to land vibrating in the dirt. The swamp witch hurled herself back from her breakfast with a snarled curse, sending robin’s eggs and river water flying and barely avoiding the second, third, and fourth arrows. They thudded into the earth behind her feet, filling the air with the sound of angry hornets. Morrigan gave a shout, twisting her fingers into a curious hooked shape and pulled, launching the hidden archer high into the air, there to hang for a moment, suspended by the ankles. She had already turn away to confront the other darkspawn by the time it fell with a crash. “Do take your time,” she drawled, sending out a burst of cold that expanded through the air as it came, striking the first howling darkspawn to emerge from the underbrush square in the face.

Across the camp there was a shriek and a crashing of blades and there came Tsurin Tabris backpedaling out of the forest. She was shouting something, perhaps orders or an answer to Morrigan, but it was swallowed up in the melee. Her mouth worked, and she spat blackened blood out of her mouth as she stepped aside an oncoming mace. The tiny elf woman’s feet barely seemed to touch ground as she fought. Her blades flashed and spun in the air, darting in and out of a hurlock’s guard, nicking, biting wounds that made it howl and lunge, swinging its cruelly barbed battleax. Tsurin danced back and straight into Alistair.

The two nearly took each other’s heads off as they spun around, blades raised. A brief moment of shock, and then they were moving again, Tsurin ducking under his upraised arm as Alistair twisted on a booted heel and smashed his shield into the oncoming hurlock’s face, forcing it back on his heels. He followed, shouting cheerful insults as it tried to go around him after Tsurin. Roaring, it redirected its attention back onto him just in time to catch one hundred and fifty pounds of snarling mabari in the chest.

Off to the side, the shaman danced and giggled at Tsurin’s approach, giving a hoot of hideous laughter as it raised its staff to point at her chest. It snarled something, some command word, and a bubble of fire spat out the staff’s end at its command. It burst with a faint pop and a burst of light and heat washed over her. Someone screamed. Tsurin realized it was her only when liquid fire dove down her open mouth and down her throat, searing her from the inside out. The fire was gone in an instant, snuffed out by the same invisible forces that brought a tingling numbness to her hands. Looking down, her blades shone a dull white beneath a layer of frost. Mist hung heavy about the ends, trailing wisps of white as she gave herself a shake. Her twin wrapped braids swung heavy in front of her face, smoking still. Flaring around her shoulders as she ducked her shoulders and dove straight through the fire.

The shaman froze in place for but a moment, staring. That was all she needed. Her blades unerringly found the chinks in his armor, scoring at hit as she danced around the creature, striking and dodging and striking again until it fell at her feet with a last flicker of spellpower. It fizzled and faded away with the creature’s death, its power unexpended.

Tsurin heaved a sigh of relief. She was about to move after the genlocks still troubling Alistair and Morrigan but paused, caught by the wink of reflected light cast off by something in the creature’s pack. Without a second thought, she bent and began rifling through the bag’s contents, pulling out a bottle of some kind of amber substance and a sprig of elfroot, which she discarded over her shoulder.

“Any time, warden!” Morrigan was heard to yell. Tsurin glanced over her shoulder long enough to confirm that they were fine without her (they were) and pulled the pack to her chest, dumping its contents into her various pouches and pockets before finally she stood, dusting off her hands. She looked towards the sounds of battle, shading her eyes. Alistair had since moved towards the group attacking Morrigan, her dog Scrapper at his heels. The three of them seemed to be finishing off the last of the darkspawn, tearing it to pieces between the three of them. By the time she’d picked her way over to them the battle was done, the last darkspawn tumbled down to fall, headless, at Alistair’s feet.

He turned to scowl at her approach, opening his mouth to scold her for abandoning them when he saw her burns. He hesitated, looking conflicted, before sighing and gesturing her over. “Here.” He dug a potion bottle out of his pack and handed it over. Tsurin stared at it blankly, up at him, then back down at the potion. “You, uh, smell rather like-”

“Your king?” Morrigan interrupted, plainly irritated that he’d offered the salve to the warden, first. Off his slack-jawed, horrified expression, she added, “You look in far better shape to me, warden. Might I suggest saving our supplies for true emergencies instead of wasting them on every scrape and blister, mmm?”

It wasn’t until some time later that Tsurin thought to take a second look at what she’d looted off of the dead shaman. Inside her bag, she found the elfroot and a handful of coins, in addition to that bottle. Curious, Tsurin removed the cork and sniffed the contents curiously. A mistake. Tsurin thrust the bottle away from her face, coughing, the whole of her face drawing in on itself. She could swear she felt her nostril hairs burning. What on Thedas was that stuff? No way that was ale, she’d drank ale, Shianni drank ale. This was dragon piss, she was sure of it.

Still.

Even if she didn’t have it, that didn’t mean the others wouldn’t. She glanced a look at Alistair over by Scrapper, and balked, physically drawing back a step. No. Memories of the beast in battle was enough to stir those old feelings of anxiety, send them roiling in her belly and up her throat, burning worse than the fire ever had. Morrigan it was, then.

The mage wrinkled her nose and looked at the dusty bottle Tsurin thrust in her face. “And you give this to me why?”

Tsurin’s face fell for a moment before she recovered, pulling it up by the corners to hang on her cheeks. “Forget it,” she said, too quickly, stepping back and away from Morrigan, putting distance between them. “It was stupid. Waste on you anyway,” she muttered, shoulders hunched. Her lower lip poked out from between her teeth before she sucked it back in, thrusting her chin up at Morrigan. Her eyes refused to meet hers, however, skittering away off the sides like a cornered animal, looking anywhere but at hers.

Those eyes had widened, briefly, before narrowing dangerously. “Oh?” Her voice cracked like a whip, striking an almost physical blow. Tsurin’s eyes snapped back. “Interesting that you speak of wastes, warden,” she purred, stepping forward to push her face up close to Tsurin’s. She retreated a step without thought and Morrigan matched her step for step, lifting a hand to trail a finger down the edge of Tsurin’s throat, where lay the faintest of white lines. “When I think of the hours I spent breathing life back into your twisted, broken shell? And this is what I am left with? I weep for the wardens, to be left with the likes of you,” she sneered, and turned on her heel, stalking away to her tent on the edge of camp.

Tsurin stared for a long moment. Her hand hovered still in the air where Morrigan had stood, and she let it drop back to her side. “She would say that,” Alistair said from beside her, and she jumped, having forgotten he was there at all. His mouth twisted, like he’d tasted something sour and was too polite to spit. “No wonder her mother wanted rid of her. A lifetime spent hearing that every day, and anyone would go mad.” He’d meant it reassuringly, mostly, so he was surprised when he turned his head down to smile at her, only to earn a truly vicious glare and a shove for his troubles.

“You- you shem!” She shoved him again, harder, and shouldered past him to the nearest genlock. Shoved the bottle into her pocket with perhaps more than was necesarry and then reached down to haul at the dead thing’s arm, pulling it away from their camp. After a moment Alistair came up with a sigh and a helping hand. Eventually even Scrapper joined in, though the dog was at least considerate enough to keep those teeth closer to Alistair.

Even with the two of them helping, it was slow going, so it was some hours before she finally managed to pluck up the courage to appoach Morrigan’s tent, bottle in white-knuckled hands. There was shuffling noises within at the sound her approach. The flap opened. “What?” Morrigan snarled, and Tsurin could see a pale half-moon of a face emerge from the darkness, darkening still further when she saw who was standing there.

Tsurin sucked in a shuddering breath and dropped her eyes down to the bottle still cradled in her hands. “Uhm. I.” Her fingers twisted. “It’s. You’re.” She finally raised her eyes to look at Morrigan again and blanched, mouth dropping open. Her hand snapped up to cover her eyes, forgetting that she still held the bottle. It cracked her square between the eyes. She swore and staggered back, swearing and clutching at her eyes.

Morrigan started laughing, a full, rich chuckle that rolled up from her belly and had Tsurin slowly lowering her hands to see the mage was smiling, and was still just as very nearly naked as she had been the last time she’d looked. Morrigan’s sleeping furs had slipped down a narrow shoulder, baring a heavy curve that shook as she laughed. Her eyes had narrowed again, this time in genuine amusement. “Do tell,” she said dryly, leaving the fur where it lay as she stretched back out on the floor of her tent. “If your intention in coming here was to hurl yourself upon your own sword in an attempt to win my affections, warden,” she said, looking up at Tsurin from behind the fall of her hair, “you’re not doing a very good job of it. You’re hardly bleeding at all.”

“Ah-” Tsurin laughed weakly, scuffing the ground with the toe of her boot. “No. That’s.”

“That’s what?” Morrigan said sharply.

Tsurin muttered something indecipherable.

“What was that?”

“You’re not a waste,” Tsurin told the ground, cheeks flushed. “I.” Just wanted to give you a present, was what she didn’t say, and wanted you to like me was another. “I just had it lying around,” was what she said instead. She licked her lips nervously and looked up to find Morrigan looking at her with the most queer expression. She didn’t know how to take that, so she looked away instead, back at the bottle. It was unmarked, which was more than she could say for her forehead. “If you don’t want it, forget it. Alistair’ll-”

“If it’s between my drinking it or dumping it down that endless well of hypocrisy and neediness,” Morrigan sniffed, rising to her feet, “then hand over the blasted thing.”

Tsurin hesitated, hanging onto the bottle long enough Morrigan’s brows started drawing together again in a dangerous expression, until finally she had to swallow that lump rising at the back of her throat long enough to croak, “Actually, I.” She hugged the bottle a little closer until she realized what she was doing and flushed, held it out in the air between them. “I thought we could. Share?”

Morrigan stared, mouth parting as a look of utter confusion chased itself across her aristocratic features. “Share.”

“Yes. That is, um, if you,” want to hovered on the tip of her tongue, waiting to be used, “get dressed first.” Morrigan looked offended until Tsurin startled to giggle into the cuff of her nightclothes, bringing her free hand up to cover the edge of her mouth. “You. You’re kind of. They’re staring at me.”

Morrigan’s mouth twitched. “If they offend your eyes so much,” she said, voice hovering on the edge of a laugh, “perhaps you ought not to stand so close to Alistair, mmm? He beats his breasts often enough,” she said with a wicked grin that set Tsurin off into another round of surprised laughter, and for a little while, at least, the pain didn’t hurt so much.


	9. Chapter 9

Once, as a girl, she chanced to see a group of Templars pursuing an apostate. The Mage they were after was a slip of a girl, scarcely older than Morrigan herself, her dark hair tumbled loose and dragging the tall grass behind. She was sobbing, clawing at the vegetation with fingers that bled. That smoked. The panicum whispered to each other in dry voices that cracked and broke the air open wide in her wake, igniting with a dull whumph.

The Templars shouted and drew back, arms coming up to shield their faces. One of them did not. The armored future stepped forward and raised a hand, and the air sang. Every last tongue of flame broke up and dissolved, blew away like so much steam. The Templars closed in. One passed so close to her hiding place that she could have reached out and touched him. He muttered under his breath, this constant stream that she only later learned were from the Chant. Asking for courage. For protection. His hands glowed where they encircled the hilt if his sword, fair humming with magic. It showed as a faint haze to the air, a slick of light and color not unlike the surface of a bubble, or mists caught before a waterfall, rippling with his every step. Throbbing, almost, in time with the beat of his heart, of his boots.

All at once it was gone. Burst out in a wave that was felt but not seen, experienced as an almost physical blow, knocking the air out of her and left her dizzied and winded, gasping for breath that wouldn’t come. Her head swam, and she tasted metal. If she’d been on her feet she would have fallen. As it was she had to close her eyes as the world tilted on its axis, struggling to breathe against the iron bar locked tight round her ribs. She screamed, noiselessly, face pressed against the grass, panicking, mindless with fear at the sudden, yawning emptiness inside of her where there had always been that spark of power, a hidden flame that should never be allowed to go out. But out it was. Morrigan didn’t know that this was but one of the abilities Templars possessed, or its name. Had never seen it in action or heard it described. In that moment, all she knew was that she was utterly without magic, defenseless as that girl cowering in the smoldering grass, and she knew that she was going to die.

That moment seemed to last a thousand years. A lifetime. And then it was over.

By the time she’d managed to find her breath again, managed to have enough precedes of mind to muffle her wheezing gasps against her mouths, she looked up to find that the Templars were turning around. Going back the way they’d come.  
At first, she didn’t see the girl, and then she did. They’d left her body where it fell, half-in and half-out of a pool of brackish water.

Morrigan crept out of hiding once the Templars had disappeared over the horizon. Made her way to the girl’s side and watched the life leave her eyes. They were blue and seemed to go on forever. It was like looking into a shard of silvered glass. She could see herself and, beyond, clouds, racing across the shallow seas and black forests, bordered by nothing but endless wastes if empty air. It left her as dizzied as the Templar had, and she’d had to look away. Look down.

Clutched in the girl’s fist was a letter she could not read and a necklace, made all of beads and smooth, sparking stones that winked in the light. Morrigan took it by impulse. Secreted it in a fold of her skirt and took it away with her from that place. Wore it every day, hidden under her clothes, until the day it fell apart between her fingers.

She did not tell Flemmeth of this incident, but she knew anyway. Knew, and didn’t care.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I'm getting all the Origins feels from your writing. You know how when you arrive in Lothering you get that discussion about where you're headed next? Well I remember Morrigan saying that Alistair had been quiet since they left Flemeth's hut, so maybe you could write about Alistairs thoughts and why he was so quiet then?

It would have been appropriate to his mood, Alistair thought, for it to be a dark day, for the air to be filled with the sounds and smells of the battlefield that he had left behind, but of course it was not, did not. The morning had dawned bright and clean and crisp, sharp with the smell of coming rains. Everywhere there was color, blue and red and gold, bright as sunlight on snow, as the gleam of a smile off a polished breastplate, brighter, and Alistair choked, his breaths coming thick and fast. Choked on the skeletons of leaves, on dust, on the fever-bright memories of smiling faces all in blue walking these roads beside him, voices upraised in trail songs that certainly hadn’t been Chantry approved but that had had him rolling, had him break down into tears when Duncan’s rolling bass broke into the chorus. On nothing at all.

The blackened, blood-spattered fields of Ostagar had never seemed further away than they did now. Or closer. The road so empty. Morrigan and the warden kept pace beside him, occasionally raising their voices in questioning tones, but he only had ears for the voices that seemed to be just on the edge of hearing. He had scouted these very roads before the campaign, along with a half dozen or so of the grey wardens that had journeyed south with Duncan and him.

Duncan.

Alistair sucked in a breath, face going slack. It was not the first time he’d felt that twist of a knife today, as it would not be the last. He had not had to face this once, but many times. The smallest of things would surprise him, confronting him again with the reality of his loss. A flick of a wrist that he had seen a hundred hundred times, a darkened crease building between the brows, a twirl of a staff that would sting, that would remind him of conversation that had had, would never have again. And the thing was, he knew it was stupid, was keenly aware of how it would sound if he tried to explain it to someone out loud, that a passing cloud made him tip back his head and bit his lip to keep from making a sound. Because it had looked like Redcliffe Castle, sort of, upstanding pennants snapping in the breeze, and that dot there, by the smudge of stables, that had been him. Redcliffe had been home to Arl Eamon and Bann Teagan, but it had never been his. Not really. It was the realization of that that had broken him on the the day of his joining, and again on the day that he opened his eyes to a grey-haired dragon woman.

That his home had been a few dozen odd misfits, a bearded face crinkled to see him. A sword, balanced against a bedtable, a hand clapped against his shoulder for the jobs done wrong as much as those done right, the knowledge that for what seemed like the first time in his life, someone believed that he was more than a stable boy, a bastard.

That his home was gone, ended at the hands of a man he had once looked to as a hero.

There would be no going back from this, this he swore.

His gauntlet tightened around Warden’s Oath with a noise like fingernails on glass. He wondered what had become of the others’, and almost let it drop, then. Down to the dirt, to be forgotten. Maybe some darkspawn would find it, and put it with the others in its collection. At the last moment, though, he couldn’t. Just. Couldn’t. It was only a twist of metal and blood, but to him, it wasn’t his blood anymore, no more than it had been Duncan’s, or any other others’. The warden’s oath contained a bit of all of those that had come before him, and he would not allow it to fall, lest it be on the archdemon’s severed head.


	11. Chapter 11

The first hour had been filled to busting with his voice. It echoed off the walls, building and reverberating until the tiny space seemed filled with men. Loud men, laughing men, men unlucky enough or stupid enough to have wound up imprisoned here the same as he. Men that cussed and men that never touched and men that crowded close enough for the laughing edges of their voice to bleed through as they whispered, telling stories to men who weren’t there because of the man who was.

The tenth hour was a physical thing. A presence in the room long after the echoes of his own voice had gone hoarse gone strained gone silent, weighing him down. Pressing on his shoulders until he had to bend or be broken.

The only sound was a tinny, rising ring. The sound was in his ears, in his choked breaths muffled against a tattered pillow. In the scratch of skin on stone, the slow, hushed whisper of time passing him by.

By the fortieth hour he’d given up watching the door, except when he did. When the Templars came by to deliver him his meals. They never spoke but he did, pressing in close to the slot in the door to tease and sing and prattle and fill the silences that would never be filled. Could never be. It made it worse, their silence. It was just the rustle of cloth and the brush of metal against metal and the sound of his own voice, gone high and reedy down the broken-edged tumbles of his day.

He stopped counting them, after that. It became impossible. Grown too hard, too heavy. Every hour was another block added to the ceiling hung low over his head.

It had ceased to be days, by then. There was no way to tell day from night in here. There were no windows, and the same candles were lit when he awoke from fitful rest as when he’d fallen asleep, cleaned and wicked and steady, with no signs of the passing hours. Without the natural rhythms to order his days by, he simply… lost them. Between one sleeping and the next, one candle and the one that followed, days were gone. It was one long, endless day, with nothing and no one to mark its passing.

There were patterns, still, mealtimes and times when a basin of water and a cloth were passed to him through the slot in the bottom of the door (his door), exchanged for a dirtier one, but they’d ceased to have all meaning. Become random, become as needful as air, as the sun he was already struggling to recall the feeling of.

By the time his beard wanted cutting he’d ceased to look forward to those times. He dreaded them, and the false hope they brought with them. The illusion of comfort, and all that meant. He stopped looking at the door when he heard the sounds of approach, and started going to sleep, instead.

And so he almost missed it, when Karl came. Every time. Every time he was jerked out of sleep by the worst sort of torture anyone could have devised for him. He yelled, the first time Karl came, snuck out of his room at great danger to himself, and Anders yelled at him. Pushed him, the second time, and still Karl came.

When he could.

He only managed it few dozen times in the whole time of his imprisonment. Each time hurt all the more. Each time twisted the thumbscrews all the harder. He grew to dread those days, too, more than all the others pressing down on him. Anders wanted nothing so badly as to speak and to listen and to clutch at him, nothing so much as for Karl to forget about him down here, or to be transferred, or consumed up in his studies. All things that had worried him before, terrified him down to his woolsy-toed socks, but even that started to seem a better alternative than this, than that last gasp of breath upon Karl’s leaving, that empty space beside him and inside him that a ragged old pillow could only define. Not fill.

It’d grown stiff where too many tears had dried, and he ran a shaking hand over them, smoothed the crinkly material with the ball of his thumb. “Sorry.” His own voice was a surprise, and he jerked at the sound of it. He opened his mouth and a laugh tumbled out. “I’m sorry.”


	12. Chapter 12

Marian hadn’t meant to fall asleep, any more than she’d meant to fall in love. It happened slowly, and all at once, a gradual lossening of her grasp on the stack of paperwork, busy work, whatever work she’d been able to find for herself that would keep her occupied, keep her distracted, keep her from looking up from her writing desk to an empty room in an empty house. Filled with treasures and trinkets, physical traces from the passing of the dead.

Statues and books and and wines and wisps of ribbon left, still, on her bedside table. It had been their routine every day, every morning, since Marian’s hands had been big enough, sure enough, to wind the splash of colored fabric in amongst her mother’s hair. Before that, she’d sat warm within the close of Leandra’s arms and hummed, sang, winding the high crack of her voice with Leandra’s. The song hadn’t mattered. Sometimes it was a silly thing, or a dirty thing, and sometimes it was a strange song, a lilting song brought to her over the oceans and the years to this moment, stretched between them with a length of ribbon. They had sat heavy in her chest, those songs, and she’d found herself humming along to one of them the day she’d turned to see that ribbon, mouth parting to open around the first words, and had sat down again, hard. Ordered Bodahn to take it away, to box it up in a room that had itself been boxed away, locked as tight as a secret never told. Given explicit orders that she knew he would disobey. Would curl the ribbon with careful hands around the gown Leandra had had lain out on the edge of her bed for the next day, all silk and lace and curling purple blossoms she’d had clipped from the tree outside her window.

She hadn’t meant to, and wasn’t that a phrase already grown tired and worn on her tongue? Well-worn as the condolences, the letters and the pats and the offers of assistance from men and women she barely knew, that they had no intentions of living up to?

She hadn’t meant to. Had only meant to rest her aching eyes for a moment, grateful for the exhaustion that painted the back of her eyes as black, as a soft, pinkened thing that bore only the shape of themselves.

She could have sworn she’d closed them only for a moment, the space of two breaths, but when she opened them again it was to nothing. To blackness, a vast, limitless expanse of black that rose up to join an empty sky. It was not featureless, however. There, growing, was a knot. Dark on dark. Ink spilled on dark paper, on water, blossoming to swirls of color, of texture, of light, a pulse, a gradual clench and release that grew and stretched before until it was everything, until she was nothing and she was caught, helpless to do anything but stare.

At the grass. At the cottage, with its fresh coat of pain and crooked shutters. At the garden, with the rabbit warren in the southeast corner. At the warm golden glow that came from nowhere and went everywhere, alighting on grey hair gone silver, winking in the light, in metal and furs and in the ruddy gleam of apples she’d tripped and knocked over in her haste to catch bugs, cicadas and grasshoppers and little brothers.

She remembered this day, so clearly. This was the day Carver had come running up, chest puffed out with pride, clutching the tiniest fish between the chubbiest fingers, stumbling and splashing muddy water all over Bethany’s skirts. This was the day Bethany had shrieked and laughed and ran to hide behind the arch of Malcolm’s shoulders, stirring up a mass of dreamstuff like snow, like a shoal of dust, rising up to hang, frozen, glittering before the light of her smile.

Everything was silent, hushed, but this scene had played itself out on her eyelids at night long enough, often enough that she was mouthing along with them, trying to force them to come alive just this once, just for now. Willing it to happen, needing it to, but it didn’t.

Malcolm’s throat bobbed around a laugh just on the edge of hearing. The air shivered with it, reverberated, just on the edge of cracking. But it never did. Her heart clutched and seized in her chest, making her next breath come as a gasp, an intake of air that wasn’t, that did nothing to still the restless, shaking, overwhelming need to hear him, to touch him. She took a stumbling step forward and nearly fell, swept up a trail of silent giggles that swept her up and around and pitched her down on shaking legs.

Bethany and Carver darted in and out of the encroaching darkness like the silver gleaming thing between Carver’s hands, little gleaming snatches of teeth and hair and muddy, skinned knees, and she was breathless. It was all caught up in her throat, her mouth, waiting to come out as a sob or a cry but she couldn’t, wouldn’t, because she knew that if she made the slightest sound it would break this moment, this spell, and they would be gone, swept away like so much dust, and she just couldn’t. She couldn’t let that happen, couldn’t stop staring at them, watching her siblings at play, and it occurred to her that she’d never really looked at them, like this. Like they had been, every day or their lives. She’d missed it. They had been such a constant, these two, such a sure thing in a life on uncertainties and change, always following after her, always pulling at her sleeves and laughing and arguing and annoying her to the absolute limits of what she could bear, until the day they didn’t. Until the day came that Carver wasn’t there, that he started to withdraw in on himself and his growing envy and fears, the day he had come home from the chantry one day parroting something, some snatch of a sermon that turned Bethany’s face in a mask, a rictus grin that never went away, not really, for days, weeks, years, until the day her smile had grown to kiss a landscape.

She’d looked away for a moment and when she looked back these two children were gone, all that light that had gathered in the shadows of shared dimples had gone away, while remaining exactly where they were, and she stared, transfixed, until something else caught her attention. There was movement, at the corner of her vision, tearing her away from the twins at last. It was Leandra. There was flour dusting her hair prematurely white and grooves in her pruny fingers and she was so, so beautiful that it hurt to look at her. To breathe. This was her mother as she hadn’t been in years. In forever. She looked so young. They all did, but-

Wrinkles had already begun to gather and settle in the soft places in her careworn face, the warm places, but her feet stepped so lightly over the grass. Easily. There was a smile tucked into the corners of her mouth that dipped low, pulling Malcolm’s eyes with it as she bent, pressed it to his, where their lips met, curved to fit. She was smiling against him, still, cheeks pressed around his nose and his beard and his breath, and it wouldn’t last, couldn’t.

Marian was shaking, looking between the two of them, the four of them, at him. Her hands were too small. Stumbled through the workings of magics she’d cast a hundred times, a thousand times before, could have cast in her sleep. Had. Because she was only a little girl and didn’t know them yet, wouldn’t learn them until after this day, because of this day.

Green light flickered and died between the desperate clutch of her fingers, slipping away like so much sand. Just like it had before. Just like it always did, every time. And every time Malcolm bent to her, as he was now, pressing the round of his nose against hers with a laugh she could feel but not hear. It ruffled her hair. The girl Marian had caught at it and laughed. The woman Marian was now caught at him, at them, but he slipped away like the magic had, faster, already turning away to say something unseen to Leandra.

Her mother touched her lips with the tips of her fingers, the bow of her mouth fluttering under her laugh, her pinkened cheeks, and she didn’t look at Marian, not once, even when Marian ran to her, was shouting, because the Marian in life hadn’t done either of those things. She’d gotten distracted by a frog and had run off to catch it, to dump it down the back of Bethany’s dress, and so she’d missed this moment.

She hadn’t seen it, heard it. Hadn’t been paying attention to this one, last private moment between them. One last moment where the sun had shone down on them, all of their hard-won freedoms and sacrifices culminating in this smile, this hand cupped to Leandra’s cheek. Her lips pressed a promise between those split palms, and there was nothing hidden in that curve, nothing held back or missing or lost.

In a moment, Malcolm would cough, would clutch at his chest, the lines of his face crumpling in on themselves in a sudden, shocked pain. Before he remembered himself. Before he laughed it off, before he swung Leandra up onto his shoulders and paraded her before his clapping children. Before he died.

Marian only slowly became aware of the clutch of fingers at her mouth. They were so pale, so bloodless in their grip, that they didn’t even feel like hers. But they were. It was her fingers, her mouth, her staring eyes fixed on the same four people that would never see her, never stop laughing. Never stop dying.

Caught as she was, it was a moment before she noticed the silver moon cast to Malcolm’s eyes, the heavy swishing pass of a presence disturbing the air between them, as of the giants that had passed beneath their boat on the way from Gwaren. A smoky laugh trailing liquid over her skin. A demon. Always before, they’d offered her power or money or tempting, teasing glances at a better life, a life where she didn’t have to be alone, to worry, but not this. Never this.

“Marian.”

Always before, she’d been able to resist.

“Marian, let’s go home.”

Always before, she’d had so much to lose, with so little to gain.  
Marian lifted up her hands, and the darkness howled in the back of her mind.


End file.
